Going To Eleven

No album has ever outsold Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” and odds are that none ever will. One of its sneaky virtues is its big, clean sound, a credit both to the recording team of Bruce Swedien and Quincy Jones, who are celebrated, and to their tools, which are not. Only a hard-core gearhead would know that their main implement, during the recording of “Thriller,” at Westlake Studios, in 1982, was a Harrison 4032, a solid-state recording console. Other prominent artists (Donna Summer, Billy Idol, Paul McCartney) made records on the same machine, but in time it fell out of fashion and use and, eventually, into the possession of Clayton Rose, the owner of a Christian-music recording studio in Fullerton, California.

When Jackson died, in 2009, Rose decided to sell the console. Asking price: a million dollars. Rose reached out to various Jacksons, but they weren’t interested. He lowered his price to five hundred thousand dollars, then to half that, then to half that again. So it wasn’t the Koh-i-Noor diamond. But it wasn’t Dionne Warwick’s toothbrush, either. He posted it on eBay. Lenny Kravitz had ponied up for the REDD.37 console that the Beatles used at Abbey Road Studios. A collector had paid more than two hundred thousand dollars for Keith Moon’s drum kit. Why not a fair sum for the mixing board that gave us “Billie Jean”?

One day, Laurent Brancowitz, the guitar player in the French band Phoenix, was poking around on eBay and came across the “Thriller” console. The asking price was thirty-two thousand dollars. He showed it to the other guys in the band, and they agreed: Phoenix had to have it. Thomas Mars, the lead singer, took up the task. Mars, who is thirty-six, and who, like the rest of his bandmates, grew up in Versailles, lives in the West Village with his wife, the filmmaker Sofia Coppola. He wore out a cassette tape of “Thriller” when he was eight. The rest of the band members live in Paris, where they make their records. “We’ve never worshipped or collected instruments or sound equipment,” Mars said. They didn’t want to reproduce the “Thriller” sound in their own recordings; their music is nothing like Michael Jackson’s. They just liked the idea of working with a consecrated artifact, as well as having something strange upon which to fixate between albums. (Their last one, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” in 2009, won a Grammy. Their next one, “Bankrupt!,” comes out in April.)

“The most mysterious part to me was that no one else—no nerd or music engineer or memorabilia freak—seemed to want it,” Mars said recently. Its availability suggested inauthenticity, as did Rose’s eagerness. “There was something a little spooky about him,” Mars said. “He was very pushy. It seemed like a scam.”

Rose had notarized authentications from two technicians who’d worked with the console, but Mars wanted a sound engineer to visit Rose’s studio and check out the merchandise. This proved hard to arrange. In e-mails, Rose harangued Mars for dawdling: “I can’t lie . . . I can’t cheet. . . . I have responsibilities with them, PayPal, and Many many other people in my life. . ! ! . . For you, or any one for that matter it is not worth being dishonest. . Piriod. . so BUY-IT. . . . it is what I say it is! If you feel distrusting or I’ll-at-ese after all of this said. . . . . than you should reconsider your desires for ‘Thriller’!”

Mars reconsidered.

Weeks later, Rose wrote, “Thomas I have had additional interest in the ‘Thriller’ as I write this e-mail, 2 people on eBay, (This is no crock of crap here) I speak the truth.” Then: “I want to see 1/3 deposit on this deal which is 9,500.00USD through Pay pal to me right away . . . no more waiting for anything ((I want to sell this console))! . . . . As in the ‘Tom Cruz’ movie ‘Gerry maguire’ a quote from ‘Actor Cuba Gooding’ an athlete Cruz was representing said to ‘Cruz’ (a famous Quote) ‘Show Me the Money.’ ”

After several more exchanges, Mars decided that it was e-mails like these which had scared off potential buyers. He soon discovered the urge to show Rose the money. Last winter, Phoenix bought the console, for seventeen thousand dollars. They had a crate built for it—it’s as long as a Ping-Pong table and weighs eleven hundred pounds—and shipped it to Paris, at a cost of seven thousand dollars. A friend in France who had once worked as a Harrison technician fixed it up, and they used it to mix “Bankrupt!” (The album’s working title was “Alternative Thriller.”) The console, they’ve found, is an extraordinary machine. “It’s almost like ‘This one goes to eleven,’ for real,” Mars said. “Except this one goes to 40K.” It has also been hard to work with. It breaks a lot and requires constant repair. Still, it brought something to the music that the band can’t quite identify. “It’s an ear madeleine,” Mars said. “It’s nice to have this madeleine.” ♦

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.